Volume 36, Number 1 · February 2, 1989
Facing Up to the Nazis
By Gordon A. Craig
Withstanding Hitler in Germany: 1933–1945
by Michael Balfour
Routledge, 310 pp., $49.95
Die Hassell-Tagebücher 1938–1944: Aufzeichnungen vom anderen Deutschland
by Ulrich von Hassell, revised and expanded from the manuscript by Klaus Peter Reiss, edited by Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen
Siedler, 689 pp., DM68
Briefe an Freya, 1930–1945
by Helmuth James von Moltke, edited by Beate Ruhm von Oppen
C.H. Beck, 600 pp., DM68
Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader
by Ronald Smelser
Berg, 330 pp., $35.00
Göring: A Biography
by David Irving
Forthcoming from William Morrow this spring
The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
by Charles S. Maier
Harvard University Press, 227 pp., $22.50
On October 12 the president of the Federal Republic of Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker, addressed the 37th Congress of German Historians at Bamberg. Boldly seizing upon one of the central issues of the so-called Historikerstreit that has divided the profession for the past two years (see The New York Review, January 15, 1987), he rejected the idea that National Socialist crimes could be palliated by comparisons with atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and other regimes and cultures. He declared that Auschwitz remained unique and the responsibility for it undiminished by time, and suggested that openness to history was a prerequisite and a pillar of West German democracy. He admonished his audience to be aware of the needs of young people:
Review, 6496 words
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